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Polemics and the Movies
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15492 |
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SPECIAL SECTION
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12 / 1989 |
1,114 Words |
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Nestor Almendros
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On May 1 this year a delegation of Soviet documentary filmmakers came to Los Angeles to meet with five directors who work in the United States. The meeting was held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, on Wilshire Boulevard, in the heart of Beverly Hills. I had the privilege of having been chosen to take part in this symposium.
First, there was a cocktail party attended by the Hollywood A list. Then three documentaries of the latest glasnost vintage were shown--short, well-made films evidencing a surprising freedom of spirit. After the screening, a packed house followed an animated discussion with great interest.
It was clear from the outset that the tone that we had grown accustomed to on earlier such occasions with Soviet artists had undergone a radical change. Suddenly we were dealing with individuals with genuinely open minds, individuals who even had a sense of humor.
When my turn to speak came, I started by sincerely praising the three films that had just been shown: "At last we sense something new in the air." But all my questions all had to do with the past: "As a documentary filmmaker, I owe a great deal to the artistic mastery of the early Soviet directors," I said. I spoke of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, remembering Enthusiasm, The Man Behind the Camera, and Que Viva Mexico. I expressed a desire to know something more about the later years of these directors, about which very little is known in the West. I also wanted to know what the Soviets think about these directors nowadays.
Liars!
The answer was brief and quite unexpected; it came from the youngest member of the Soviet delegation: "Vertov and Eisenstein were both liars!" he declared. We could hardly believe our ears. He went on, "Their films can only be regarded as being fantastic stories completely divorced from the Soviet reality of the time. Western film buffs are always talking about these directors, who--it is true--did have great technical skill but whose work now can be taken seriously only as formal exercises in editing and cinematography."
"Vertov, for example," declared Sergei Mirochnitchenko--carefully framing his concluding statement as if to prove to us just what monsters we were defending--"would have liked to raze all the churches in Russia."
The tone of their answers was angry; for a moment I had the terribly paradoxical feeling that I was being accused of being a Stalinist. I wanted to take the microphone again in order to rephrase my question and justify myself. I wanted to say that I considered Vertov and Eisenstein as great artists of propaganda and political publicity, like Leni Riefenstahl with her Triumph of the Will, or, going back even further, Calderon de la Barca with his autos sacramentales during the Inquisition. But someone else now had the microphone, and I had to wait until the end of the symposium to be able to talk alone with these young zealots. The surprising lesson I learned that evening was that as far as the early years of the Soviet era are concerned, today's young Soviet directors have gone farther than we who have long been disillusioned with communism.
A small group gathered around us and I finally
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